You (46 page)

His breathing was rapid.

‘Like how?’

‘Not all cosy cosy, ooh Mummy.’

‘Don’t say that.’

He scratched his scalp hard.

‘What, then?’ she said.

‘Taken in by some woo-woo arseholes.’

‘Who? What?’

‘My so-called parents.’

‘God, Dan. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Why? What have I got in common with you? A princess case whose “mother” thinks the sun shines out of her arse?’ He shifted his weight with a jerking movement on to one hip.

‘Dan, don’t.’

‘Don’t you want to find the real ones?’ he said.

‘These are the real –’

‘How did I know you’d say that?’ he said abruptly. ‘Don’t you just want to
see
who you grew inside? Who – gave you –? I always did.’

‘Mine’s dead,’ said Izzie in the lowered voice that angered him.

He shook his head at her, his lip stiff with undisguised derision.

‘I’m going to fuck off now,’ he said, kicking a pile of clothes so that they flew through the air and landed slowly, a sock catching the door handle. ‘Now the old man’s back. He might shoot me.’

‘He doesn’t know you’re here.’

‘She’ll tell him.’

His eyes shone. He bent over and began to cough, wheezing with a phlegmy clearing of his throat.

‘Dan! Who?’ said Izzie.

‘That cow. Bitch. Cunt.’

‘Who –’ said Izzie breathlessly, still crouching near the door.

‘Her.’

‘You mean Mum?’ said Izzie, her mouth open. Her eyes were wet.

‘That whore.’

‘God, Dan. Dan! Don’t
speak
about her like that!’ said Izzie, beginning to cry.

‘I’m going.’

Izzie stared at him. She shook her head at him.

‘I want you,’ she said quietly.

He was silent. A streak of cooler air ran into the room.

‘I really want you,’ she said, crying again. ‘I thought you might, like, stay here. You were going to – hold me. Stay with me.’

His face softened. His lower lip was unsteady. ‘We were going to do it again,’ he said, almost absently.

‘At legal time.’

He peered at her clock in the gloom. He turned to her, blank-eyed, and picked up a lock of her hair.

‘You’re just about legal,’ he said. ‘I’ll have you illegally again now. Then when the clock bangs . . .’

‘Then?’

‘Then we’ll fuck. Again.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I’ll fuck off.’

‘No
no
!’ cried Izzie, throwing her arms round his chest, clinging to him.

Thirty-three

June

Dora and Elisabeth had walked back towards the cottage in the half-darkness to the sound of late birdsong above the trickle of streams.

‘Let me come with you,’ said Elisabeth.

‘I don’t want you any more,’ said Dora, the shadows cast by arching bracken lending her boldness.

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘You don’t?’ Dora shook her head and smiled. ‘No, darling.’

‘Oh,’ said Elisabeth, at a loss.

‘We can talk in the garden,’ said Dora as they approached Wind Tor Cottage and she pushed the gate against the topple of honeysuckle that slowed its path.

‘Why?’ said Elisabeth.

‘It seems artificial but . . .’

The gate tore stems with a straining sound.

‘But I’m too dangerous to be let into your house?’ Elisabeth emitted her rich laugh.

Dora caught the edge of her breath. Elisabeth appeared human, vulnerable, as she had so rarely seemed, and even faintly ordinary in her mortal form.

‘Yes,’ said Dora.

‘Breathe,’ said Elisabeth, ignoring her. ‘It smells of hay, but with the damper grass that’s always in your garden.’

‘This is a damp spot,’ said Dora. ‘I always wonder if I’m being punished! The past seeping in.’

Elisabeth pressed Dora’s arm. ‘You are more fanciful than your daughter, I sometimes think.’

‘You don’t know my daughter,’ said Dora stiffly.

‘My husband does,’ said Elisabeth, and paused. She raised one sharp eyebrow. ‘I suspect he meets her more than he lets on. I’ve seen them together.’

‘Oh, she told me she’d met him,’ said Dora.

‘He goes off every lunchtime. He never did that before. Free periods –’

‘She’s working very hard to finish her book.’

‘Is she? I wonder. What trouble . . . Of all teachers . . . Wouldn’t one have imagined James would be the last?’ said Elisabeth, stretching delicately as if to demonstrate her indifference. ‘I almost admire him for it sometimes . . . And that she would have been the last pupil . . .’

‘I cannot bear to think about this,’ said Dora, holding her hands over her ears. ‘There’s no point now. It’s appalling. I will be angry.’

Elisabeth laughed, but gently. ‘There’s a lot you can’t bear to think about.’

‘And yet,’ said Dora. ‘Now that I’m not sure how much longer . . . Things seem clearer. I do think.’

She walked around the garden with Elisabeth beside her, warm clusters of gnats shadowing the hedge and trees. Elisabeth took Dora’s arm.

‘Clearer. About what?’

‘About the baby.’

‘What baby –?’

Dora turned on her impatiently, extricating her arm. A blackbird sang loudly on the hedge above them.

‘There is only one baby in my life. The others all grew up.’

‘Certainly not a baby any more.’

‘But he was,’ said Dora, bowing her head. Her hair fell forward and she pulled a strand from her mouth, lifting it impatiently from her tongue. ‘And I never ever forget. That face.’

‘You know I’ve never particularly cared to talk about this. And I don’t care now,’ said Elisabeth. ‘It was unpleasant. It was done. We have to move on.’

‘You’re hard,’ said Dora slowly. ‘But then I . . . it’s true that I couldn’t talk about it either. Not to Celie, who was the only one who
did
want to talk about it. For years, she did, and – does. I used to think, I’d rather die than address the big things.’

‘My Dora,’ said Elisabeth, putting her arm round Dora’s shoulder. ‘You really do think too much sometimes.’

‘Do you remember?’ said Dora, turning round and shrugging off Elisabeth’s arm with a small movement as she did so. ‘Remember the day the baby was born? How I was just after? Wild. Mad. You arrived in the afternoon; I remember. How do you think Celie was? Do you think I ever stop thinking about that bundle disappearing through the back door?’

It was that, that bundle, held by the woman who had just assisted the birth and who was now suspended in some luminous daze of gratification, Cecilia alone in bed: it was that one image that came back to her, the blanket-wrapped baby a little breathing package, a fuzzy sad picture as though caught on CCTV. It was the last time Dora had seen her grandson. She watched them leave, Moll and Flite, their tears falling; watched their backs as they went out through the door, across the yard up to the cottage, and then left, as arranged, in their van that very afternoon: the new mother arriving in Wales having ostensibly just given birth. She looked the part, Dora always thought, the solid Moll in her layers of skirts – the baby in its sling, bottle feeding due to early mastitis, the ruffled glow and tentative movements of the new mother. Moll would say that she had given birth at home in England, register the baby as hers and Flite’s, producing documentation from a midwife friend of hers, and start their new life as parents in Wales. And then – as Dora knew now – beyond Wales: beyond, and beyond.

‘I was such a fool,’ said Dora, her head in her hands.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ said Elisabeth.

‘No!’ said Dora.

Elisabeth breathed sharply through her nose.

Dora smiled. She shook her head. She breathed deeply. ‘I think it was only ever sex that could make me stop thinking about this,’ she said. ‘You and sex, I mean. Love, what I thought – sometimes – was love. They were the only time I could escape the truth.’

‘I did love you. Do. You’re my sexy maternal calmness. I tell you so often. The opposite of me in so many ways. And yet not.’

‘Maternal,’ said Dora bitterly.

‘You were. You are. Too maternal for me – for my liking, I mean,’ said Elisabeth and kissed Dora suddenly, briefly, on the lips. ‘Can you please try to get over this? I had absolutely no idea you continued to feel like this. My darling one, it’s
years
ago. You were a sweet fool to give it to those unpleasant hippies, of course. If you’d have discussed it with me . . .’

‘You didn’t want to know. You resisted, didn’t want any of the details.’

‘I just wanted it out of the way, frankly. Like you did. Let’s not kid ourselves. But it was terribly home-knitted of you to arrange that adoption yourself!’ She laughed with a nervous awkwardness. ‘You’d be clapped in jail now . . .’

Dora flinched.

‘You know, it was only over the years I realised that,’ she said with something like a small gasp.

Elisabeth rubbed the back of Dora’s head, alternating light fluttering movements with harder strokes, and Dora pressed her eyes into the ridges of the knitted cotton on her shoulder and in her mind she saw Cecilia’s face – as it had been; as it was now – the two faces merging.

‘
Where is she?
’ Cecilia had said, waking and confused, when Dora and Moll had returned from bathing the new baby and dressing him in a nappy and sleepsuit.

Dora hesitated.

‘She?’ she said.

Cecilia held out her arms.

Dora glanced at the baby, wrapped up.

‘Here,’ she said.

Cecilia stared down at the baby’s head, blinking. She kissed it, nuzzled it. The baby started to turn to a nipple, and Dora moved quickly towards the bed.

‘Say goodbye,’ she said quietly, not looking at Cecilia; or she thought she’d said it.

‘
I never said goodbye
,’ said Cecilia time and time again over the years. ‘She just left.’

She
, Cecilia called the baby from the beginning, having, Dora surmised, misheard, or simply assumed. Throughout the pregnancy, Dora noticed, she had instinctively and then increasingly unquestioningly believed that the baby would be a girl.

‘You cuddled – cuddled . . . her,’ said Dora, staggering over words the first time.

‘I didn’t!’ said Cecilia. ‘Only for seconds! I wanted to say goodbye to her.’ She wailed square mouthed like a red-faced child, her breasts full and, to Dora, alarming, spilling out of her nightdress. ‘I’d been asleep. I didn’t know you were taking her
then
.’

‘She . . . her,’ Cecilia continued to say, within days expressing regret and asking barely rational questions, and Dora had allowed the mistake to prevail as a further disguise, another level removed from the truth, along with her hazy official adoption story. She would not, could not, engage with the facts.

‘I honestly hadn’t planned to lie,’ said Dora now, tears running from the corners of her eyes and flattening sorely over her face.

‘You did it in panic,’ said Elisabeth soothingly.

‘And then I couldn’t get out of it. I told her wrong things about the parents. I thought she might be less attached if it wasn’t a real person in our lives.’

Elisabeth patted her.

‘I never corrected her on the girl thing . . .’

‘Sweetie.’

‘I
wanted
her not to be able to find him. Do you think I was a coward?’

‘No,’ said Elisabeth, shaking her head as she stroked Dora’s shoulders. ‘It’s getting colder out here.’

‘I was. I was a terrible coward.’

‘No.’

‘I was afraid of them – Moll and Flite,’ said Dora. ‘But I wanted to save Celie’s youth, wanted to – protect us all. But oh God, Elisabeth, she has built this myth of this daughter. This mythical daughter. I would never know how to . . . I didn’t
expect
her to be so relentless about it. Ever.’

‘Could you tell her now?’

‘My God, she would never speak to me again,’ said Dora, and cried loudly into Elisabeth’s chest. Elisabeth palpably stiffened, and then softened, against her. ‘And worse – I admit worse than that – I’d lose the three girls.’ Her speech faltered between tears. ‘After it took me so many years to begin to know them. I love them so much.’

Elisabeth shook her head.

‘There is no need now.’

‘I tried and tried to track Moll and Flite down,’ said Dora weakly. ‘Once I really understood the grief of Celie.’ She swallowed. ‘One of their friends threatened me once when he came past here and I asked after Moll and Flite and the baby. He kept talking very aggressively about “their kid”. About, I don’t know, “people leaving them and their kid alone”. I used to be afraid of arson.’ She shrugged hopelessly. ‘Threats, exposure, of all sorts of revenge. They were quite scary, some of those people.’